art+architecture

Taiping Tianguo lower Manhattan walking tours

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In conjunction with Taiping Tianguo, e-flux has organized a series of guided walks in the East Village, Lower East Side, and downtown Manhattan led by Ryan Wong, Julie Ault and Amy Zion, and Gregory Sholette. These walks—given by artists, colleagues, and historians—will address cultural activities that took place in these locations in the late 1970s and early ’80s. Each will provide unique and personal contexts for considering the work of Ai Weiwei, Frog King Kwok, Tehching Hsieh, and Martin Wong included in the exhibition.

Taiping Tianguo explores connections between these four Chinese artists, who lived and worked in New York during the heady days of the 1980s and early ’90s. During that period, New York was welcoming a diaspora of creative people while also experiencing the critical early years of the AIDS pandemic. At the same time in China, the contemporary art scene was battling authoritarian censorship and repression.

“Putting Public Space in its Place,” Harvard GSD Conference on Public Space

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Putting Public Space in its Place

 

HarvardUniversity

A Harvard Conference on Public Space

March 7, 5–8pm & March 8, 2013, 8:30–6pm

 

Piper Auditorium

HarvardGraduateSchool Of Design

Cambridge, MA

Free & open to the public

In a digital age, people will reflect upon 2011 as the year in which physical public space reclaimed its lofty status in the public sphere. From Tahrir Square to ZuccottiPark, physical public space reminded us of its multiple ambitions and capabilities for accommodating consequential political activities as well as everyday leisurely pursuits. Put plainly, place still matters. This conference at HarvardUniversity will focus on physical (corporeal, material, tangible) public space. Physical public space comes in many flavors: publicly owned parks, streets, and sidewalks, privately owned public spaces, privately managed public parks, and temporary spaces that appear and disappear within a parking spot, under a bridge, in a surface parking lot, or anywhere else.

The production of public space simultaneously implicates and transcends technical decisions with regard to design, financing, and management considerations. Who should design public space? Should public spaces be designed at all? How should success of a public space be measured? Can the private sector participate in public space provision without a loss of “publicness”? Do achievements of democracy and equality depend on ample availability of public space? Can public space make a meaningful contribution to solving the world’s environmental problems, including storm water flooding? Are there universals of public space that define its use and appearance no matter where the space is located? Are temporary or informal public spaces a fad or breakthrough? Can theory inform, or better inform, practice? Public space scholars, practitioners, and activists will discuss and debate these and other questions along with an engaged audience. Attendance at the conference is free and open to the public.